Your encoder settings are pretty good. I could make minor suggestions for improvement but ultimately you're seeing limits on YouTube's side.

My suggestions would be up the data rate to 50Mbps. Use High Profile CABAC. Doing this will only help very little though.

Also, as per your comparison, you may want to use processing filters to compensate for the changes YouTube's encoder is making in your black and gamma.

Some things such as "water motion," clouds, camera movement, transition are very big challenges for encoders since pixels are changing every frame and codecs use that to decide what information gets thrown out.

on May 6, 2014 at 8:15:09 pmLast Edited By Ivan Myles on May 6, 2014 at 8:47:38 pm

I agree with Craig's points. As an extension of his comments, I see two primary issues: 1) the low bitrate of YouTube videos, and 2) the bitrate-hungry nature of the source video. Vimeo's x264 encoder is a little more efficient and should produce better results, but may not resolve the problem.

Low bitrate encoding produces the highest image quality when change is minimized; you want to construct shots so that pixels can be reused from frame-to-frame to the greatest degree possible. For example, a flat pan is better than a camera swivel because the image can just be repositioned in the following frames. Similarly, don't move the camera when there is a lot of motion/change in the shot.

Here are some things to consider when trying to improve the quality of low-bitrate video:

On one extreme, HD movies with high motion, quick cuts, detailed images, and moving cameras will need to be encoded at high bitrates to look good. At low bitrates shots should be simplified if you want to produce good quality.

FYI: The file you submitted is 0.81 bits/pixel at 1080p. YouTube typically transcodes video to about 0.07 bpp. Apple uses around 0.12 bpp. I typically target 0.15-0.20 bpp at 480p for high quality streaming and provide a hi-def version for downloading.